A few days after my wife and I had moved into our home in New Haven,
Connecticut, an electrician came to fix some electrical outlets that
weren't working. Jerry was middle-aged and friendly, and he asked me
what I did at Yale. When I mentioned my affiliation with the Yale Center
for the Study of Globalization, he seemed stunned, as if I had just
confessed to being a charter member of a Colombian drug cartel. "Oh!
God help you," he muttered. Puzzled, I asked what was wrong. Jerry was
clearly surprised to meet someone who he thought actually worked for
globalization. "Isn't it true that globalization destroys the rain forest?"
he asked by way of explanation. My protestation that the closest I had
ventured to the Amazon was to order a few books did little to help my
standing.

But Jerry's reaction had raised important questions. What precisely
is globalization, and why is it accused of damaging the rain forest?
It seems to have appeared out of nowhere, and now it is everywhere.
Almost every problem, even extraordinary developments, has been laid
at the door of this phenomenon called globalization. Its role in damaging
rain forests is perhaps the easiest to understand. Forests are being
cleared mainly to create farmland for the world's growing population.
Rising international trade and the growing demand for construction materials
and furniture have brought traders and loggers into the act. To answer
Jerry's concerns, I thought it was important to understand who the globalizers
are, what they are doing and why, and how long they have been at it.

Since the word globalization appeared in the dictionary, its meaning
has undergone a massive transformation. Just two of the dozens of de?nitions
of globalization illustrate the problem in grappling with this phenomenon.
Writing in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Jeffrey L. Watson defnes globalization
in cultural terms-as "the process by which the experience of everyday
life, marked by the diffusion of commodities and ideas, can foster a
standardization of cultural expressions around the world." The offcial
World Bank defnition of globalization is stated, not surprisingly, in
purely economic terms, as the "freedom and ability of individuals and
firms to initiate voluntary economic transactions with residents of
other countries." Left-wing critics, echoing Karl Marx's observation
about the "werewolfsh hunger" of capitalism reaching the four corners
of the world, see globalization as synonymous with expansionist and
exploitative capitalism. Looking at globalization through the prism
of business and economics helps one to understand the Internet, the
mobile phone, and the cable TV-connected world we inhabit, but it does
not explain how human life was globalized long before capitalism was
formulated or electricity invented.

Many recent books, notably Thomas L. Friedman's The World Is Flat,
have explained how mobile capital, trade, and technology have created
today's instantaneously connected, interdependent world. Economic historians
like Kevin O'Rourke and John G. Williamson have shown how the transportation
revolution in the late nineteenth century kicked o? large-scale trade
and migration, laying the foundation for the current era of globalization.
In fact, in their view, globalization began when large-scale trading
brought about a convergence of commodity prices all over the world.
But globalization defined in strictly economic terms leaves unexplained
the myriad instances of global connectedness and indeed convergence
that appeared long before the steamship.

The term globalization emerged because the visibility of our globally
connected life called for a word to sum up the phenomenon of this interconnectedness.
But if one looked under the hood of our daily existence, one could see
a multitude of threads that connect us to faraway places from an ancient
time. Without looking into the past, how does one explain that almost
everything, from the cells in our bodies to everyday objects in our
lives, carries withinitself the imprints of a long journey? Why in that
first instance did human beings leave Africa and become a globalized
species? Most of what we eat, drink, or use originated somewhere else
than where we find these objects today. Almost everything we associate
with a nation or take pride in as our own is connected with another
part of the world, however remotely. Today's capitalist business model
can explain why Starbucks coffee, an iconic symbol of globalization,
is sold in thousands of locations around the world or why Japan's Canon
camera is a globally recognized brand. But the economic definition leaves
other questions unanswered. How, for example, did the coffee bean, grown
first only in Ethiopia, end up in our cups after a journey through Java
and Colombia? How did the name of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteswar, translated
into Chinese as Guanyin and in Japanese as Kwanon, inspire the Japanese
brand name for a camera?

Endless other questions point to deeper processes at play. How is
the same gene mutation found in three people living in continents thousands
of miles apart? How did Islam, born in the deserts of Arabia, win over
a billion converts in the world? How did Europeans learn to play the
violin with a bowstring- made of Mongolian horsehair? Or, for that matter,
how did the ninth-century Arab mathematician al-Khwarizimi lend his
name to the algorithms that now run the world of information? How did
the economic model of growing sugarcane with slave labor, developed
in the eastern Mediterranean, reach the Carib- bean? Why was there no
fiery kimchi in Korea before Christopher Columbus found chili pepper
plants in the New World? How did the United States currency get its
name from a German silver-mining town? Why are the grapes that yielded
the first barrel of wine in California called mission grapes? How did
the Chinese paper-making technology reach the West and end up producing
the stock for the book you are reading? The questions are as varied
as they are unending, and they go to the heart of the all-embracing
phenomenon of global interconnectedness. The economic definition of
globalization cannot explain why an electrician in New Haven cared about
the Brazilian rain forest or how global awareness of such issues has
arisen. As we shall see in Chapter 8, the story of how the word globalization
emerged is directly linked to the visibility of growing integration
of the world. The term globalization, reflecting awareness of these
global connections, grew out of the very process it describes a process
that has worked silently for millennia without having been given a name.

This book attempts to show that globalization stems, among other things,
from a basic human urge to seek a better and more fulfilling life and
that it has been driven by many actors who can be classified, for the
sake of simplicity, as traders, preachers, adventurers, and warriors.
These globalizers left their original habitats in the pursuit of a more
enriching life or to fulfill their personal ambitions. In so doing,
they not only carried products, ideas, and technology across borders,
but with increased interconnectedness they created what Roland Robertson
calls "intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole." Despite
his distaste for "globalization," electrician Jerry's concern for the
health of the planet squarely places him among the globally aware who
are themselves a product of an intensely interconnected world. Literally,
of course, one cannot talk of such global connections until the first
circumnavigation of the globe by Ferdinand Magellan in 1519. However,
in the broad sense of expanding the known world-which the Greeks called
oikumene-and linking the fate of geographically separated communities,
globalization, as a trend, has been with us since the beginning of history.
The same forces, sometimes with different names, are at work today in
connecting the world ever faster and tighter. Multinational companies,
nongovernmental organizations, activists, migrants, and tourists have
been continuing the process of integration that began thousands of years
ago.

This book is thus the result of a personal quest for an understanding
of, if not answers to, some simple questions: Who are the globalizers,
and how does one explain the global origins of everything that surrounds
us? My search for the answers to many such questions altered my understanding
of globalization, and the way I look at it today is quite different
from when I started out. I have tried to understand the origin and transformation
of goods and ideas as they travel the world from where they started,
looking at the global voyage of commodities and concepts. In order to
grasp the forces that have spurred various global journeys, I have focused
on a selected set of commodities and ideas as examples of a broader
trend. I have tried to identify the main actors and their motivations.
To appreciate the trajectory of these actors-traders, preachers, adventurers,
and warriors, and the goods and ideas they have carried, I have looked
at them over a millennial canvas. My story of globalization begins with
the journey of anatomically modern humans out of Africa some fifty thousand
years ago. Out of the necessity for survival, these people were the
first adventurers who over generations moved on, occupying the inhabitable
areas of the earth, and taking divergent paths before settling down
and reconnecting with other dispersed human communities. I have abandoned
the conventional format of presenting a linear history of a particular
people or territory and have tried instead to trace the growing connections
and interdependence through the action of these four actors. A brief
chronology of the role played by the four actors is given on pages 321-330.